When I Stopped Listening to Rush Limbaugh

This is a story of my own personal odyssey through American politics. I'll start at the beginning, which would have been when I started listening to Rush. I was a typical latchkey kid living in the sticks with nothing but staticy network TV reception. This would have been around 1992, so the internet wasn't quite in the house yet, that would come a couple of years later. I was 12 years old and had discovered the wonders of AM radio. I left it on talk radio all day long, and the rantings of Rush Limbaugh became my soap opera. I listened with rapt attention to all of the scandals happening in our nation's capital. It was outrageous. I was probably one of just a handful of teeny-boppers who could tell you about the missing FBI  files, the wronged women Clinton abused, Vince Foster (no powder burns in mouth; no footprints around the body!),  Hillarycare, the Commerce Secretary felled from the air, etc. I'll tell you right now this stuff blew my mind. Why didn't anyone care?



Then came the '94 elections.  I'll never forget the look on Dan Rather's face when he had to say that the Republicans had taken the house. It was glorious and exciting. I actually thought, now things will really begin to change and we'll start to turn this thing around! I was 14, give me a break, okay? So I continued to listen to Rush when school was out and over the summer. On the school bus to the math team competition, I remember making the comment, 'hey Rush is on right now, and some how a brought up the number for the show'. The boy sitting behind me said you mean, 1-800-282-2882? Turns out he was a real dittohead, too. He taped the show wiring his radio into the VCR someway. He also was the only kid from our school to place at math team.

So then for my sweet 16, my parents get me The Limbaugh Letter. Now I have all those great quotes from the liberals contradicting themselves written down for future reference. Pretty cool, huh? I went to the Governor's School for Science the following summer at the University of Tennessee and got some pretty weird looks carrying around Newt Gingrich's To Restore America book. I also read a Harry Browne book, too, trying to take my mind off of the grotesque amount of liberalism that surrounded me on all sides. I thought I would be safe from that in a science program, but no, in my biology specialization, we spent an entire class period debating on the sexism and stigma of female scientists wearing makeup. Note to self: don't go to school here.

So there I am looking forward to the '96 presidential race. I'm pretty stoked about getting that Clinton out of office, as the stuff he's getting away with is crazy. But we all know how that turned out. Rush had to reset his America Held Hostage clock, and then the impeachment stuff started to happen. I wanted Clinton to get impeached over those little annoying habits like selling Communist China missile technology through Loral. I was fast becoming disillusioned, not with Rush, but with the Republicans that I thought were going to change things. Yes, I do feel stupid. Turns out that there were Republicans who were dealing dirty just like Clinton and didn't want the investigation to shine onto them. Antony Sutton found this out the hard way back in 1972, but I didn't know about any of that at the time. I do remember making the comment to my English teacher my senior year about how we had no business being in Bosnia and it actually harmed the people there as they would never be able to stand up for themselves if not continuously propped up. Being so young, I could have only formed these opinions via Rush.

So at 18, I get married to the boy who wired up his VCR to record Rush. We are now at college and listening to Rush together in our apartment. My personal life was kind of crazy at this point and I wasn't the political junkie I used to be. However, it was at this point that I got cable and Foxnews was the latest thing. I had heard of this Foxnews via Rush as an alternative to the liberal media. I watched Hannity and Colmes every night. I know. I even watched O'Reilly every night too. But through it all Rush was still a regular part of my media diet. I distinctly remembered him mocking the bombing of the Iraqi aspirin factory as a way to distract us from Clinton's shenanigans.

Then comes the 2000 election. We would finally be rid of the Clintons, but the Goracle loomed large on the stage. How could it even be close after what the last eight years had brought? I relied on Rush a whole lot to get me through these tough times. He kept me informed of what the libs were up to. At this point in time, my mind was programmed to expect dirty tricks and didn't think twice about the Supreme Court siding with the Bushes. At least is wasn't more of the same, and now we would be getting somewhere. Yes, I do feel stupid now, thank you.

So then came 9/11, the Patriot Act, and Homeland Security. I didn't give it a whole lot of thought at the time, as I was busy with school, babies, and figuring out what flowers to put in the flower bed. I figured that the Patriot surely came with some sort of sunset date, but it didn't. Ruh-roh. I watched as Osama was pinned down at Tora Bora, and wondered why he wasn't captured. As the years rolled by, I kept wondering why the most sophisticated military in the world couldn't locate and capture or kill one man and his band of jihadis? I was even more mystified when watching the 2004 debates and seeing George W. act annoyed with the whole Iraq wasn't connected to Al Qaeda. He said something to the effect of: "I know that Iraq isn't connected to 9/11, OK!" I guess it was his distant attitude that kind of made me think twice about things. Our soldiers and their mission were constantly coming under attack by the libs, which annoyed me greatly. I listened to Rush doing housework during this time and he would always bring to my attention what those unpatriotic liberal idiots were up to now. Little did I know I was being hardened against anything they could possibly have to say about defense spending, foreign policy, or anything else. However, in the back of my mind, I kept wondering what the endgame for all of the multiplying wars would be. I wasn't programmed far enough to think that perpetual war was some sort of awesome "American exceptional" characteristic.

It was also during the Bush years, that  the Ken Lay scandal stuff happened. I couldn't help but think back to when I first started following politics as a teenager. I felt so conned. I also remember Rush saying (after he got his big Clear Channel deal) how some people accused him  of being  out of touch, and I was like, naw, Rush you're the same as you ever were. It was around the 17th time he claimed that people were saying he was out of touch that I begin to think that he "protested too much". Then I remember that at about the same time the prescription drug deal went through, Rush said that he had "had it" and wasn't going to carry their water anymore. Meaning of course, that he had been smoothing over the gross incompetence and/or corruption of the Republican party.

At about this point, we're up to the 2007 elections. I was pulling for ol' Fred, not knowing about CFR and such. I tickled me to see him refuse to raise his hand to acknowledge the whole global warming fiasco. When he didn't make it, I remember fielding a call from an RNC person fishing for donations to get McCain in the White House. She said, "you want to beat Barack Obama, right?" And I'm like, "meh". Because just before this call, both Obama AND McCain had voted for TARP, which I thought was a socialistic move. I, being a red-blooded anti-commie descendant of many, many Revolutionary soldiers, just don't roll that way. (This is why I will never support Romney, Cain, Perry, et al) As far as I was concerned, there was just one party in charge. I kept hearing Rush say, "elections mean things", but from where I sat, as a 15 year observer, I had to disagree. I'd been pulling for Republicans all this time and we only wound up with more socialized medicine, total Federal takeover of education, a Stasi-like Big Brother department, and a defense department that comprised 25% of our GDP. Nice. So it was at this point, that I stopped listening to Rush, and started to try to put the pieces together on my own. I started blogging right after the Obamacare vote, and my stands on various issues have drastically changed the more educated I became.

Not all my time with Rush was ill spent. The one thing that sticks with me is what he used to say about the Clintons all the time: How many people have to be lying in order for the Clintons to be telling the truth. You can apply this sentence to just about anything the government tells you that is in conflict with other evidence. It's like an Occum's razor you can apply to so many situations. The other thing you can think about, is who stands to gain from whatever new policy, program, or product the Elite are trying to shill for today.

It's not enough to say that liberals are stupid, okay? It's time to move beyond that and figure out who the real players are. They have names and companies and spend money so as to see their goals accomplished. With this in mind, I hope we can put pieces together and collectively stop being played as a bunch of fools. If I, as a homeschooling mom of five with never-ending laundry can take my ex-TV-watching time and do a little research to find out what is going on, how come a childless man who actively works three hours a day can't verify facts and do some searching to see what is going on in this country? To tell you the truth, I couldn't handle him talking about his stupid cats, his golf game, and the Steelers while our country was circling the commode. For instance, one of his facts of life is that feminism was invented to give ugly women access to the mainstream of society. A little research actually exposes the fact that feminism was funded and promoted by the Ford Foundation by the admission of the feminists themselves. It ties into the eugenic mindset of a sexless society where we are regarded has human resourced automatons serving the state and not as we were created as families, with our own unique and loving roles. Feminism serves the state by separating children from the family and forcing them into state-approved conditioning centers (state-licensed day-cares and schools, etc.) and skimming all those FICA taxes off the paychecks of the non-male part of the populations. So Rush can joke about it all day, but he never brings home the point of what feminism does to society in general. But maybe that's the point, Rush provides a relief valve for those of us who are fed up with being corralled into this centralized system and want to hear someone else say something negative about it. Which is fine, but as a mom, I get tired of the whining and want to see some problem solving. Check out the

Check it out here

Major bankster activity here. Check out Vernon Jordan who used to be on the board of Clear Channel. I first heard his name on Rush in connection with the Clintons. He's also on the board of about 8 other corporations - big ones. Good grief, you could do one post about our buddy Vernon and probably dig up a lot of new info. It never ends

cross-posted at Don't Tread on Us